In Las Vegas, one final echo of the boom years

The massive CityCenter complex on the Las Vegas Strip, set to open officially next week, is a blast from the very recent past.

With a price tag of $8.5 billion, a roster of famous designers including Daniel Libeskind, Norman Foster, David Rockwell, Cesar Pelli and Rafael Vinoly and a staggering 18 million square feet of space inside six towers and a Strip-front shopping mall, the development is a fitting coda to the decade of celebrity architecture and overextended real-estate mania from which we've just emerged.

If we now expect every major hotel-casino in Las Vegas to have a theme, the one that applies here isn't difficult to make out, despite the architects' collective attempt to scrub the project free of kitsch and historical ornament and coat it with a high-gloss, homogenous and faintly corporate sheen.

CityCenter's true theme is leverage. Ranking as the largest private development in American history, big enough to fill the tallest building in Los Angeles, the U.S. Bank Tower, roughly a dozen times over, the complex is a palace -- a series of connected palaces, actually -- for the age of towering debt and easy credit. They should have put Alan Greenspan's face on the poker chips.

They didn't, of course. Though the project seems to speak to us from the far side of the 2008 economic meltdown, its overriding aesthetic is too grown-up and irony-free for any overt references to its roots in a headier, freer-spending era. Built by MGM Mirage in partnership with the now-infamous Dubai World, CityCenter’s 67 acres of hotel rooms, condominiums, conference facilities, casino tables, restaurants, shops and lobbies are wrapped in a series of shimmering mirrored-glass packages, making the place from certain angles look like a slightly less buttoned-up version of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Time Warner Center in Manhattan.

That architectural sensibility -- ambitious but not really adventurous, chasing bigness if not big ideas -- can be chalked up in part to Ehrenkrantz, Eckstut and Kuhn, the New York firm that developed CityCenter’s master plan, and Gensler, which served as executive architect and helped assemble the well-known but fairly conservative team of architects. The approach is clearest to see in two crescent-shaped towers: Pelli's Aria Resort and Casino, which rises at the center of the complex, and Vinoly's Vdara Hotel and Spa, which stands politely toward the back. Inside, the color schemes tend toward coffee-brown, latticed-wood handsomeness, and the grounds are dotted with artwork by Henry Moore, Maya Lin and others.

All of which is too bad, really: If CityCenter represents a final bender for Wall Street's decade of unreason -- and since this after all is Las Vegas -- it might at least have pursued a wilder, more inventive and more entertaining kind of architectural gigantism. Given MGM’s declarations all along that this was going to be the first truly high-design development on the Strip, it’s tough not to wander through the place and think – even if it’s purely an architecture-lover’s fantasy -- about what might have been if a really rip-roaring group of firms, one with a collective taste for scale, color, irony and abandon, had been allowed to drain that $8.5 billion budget.

To be fair, there are a handful of memorable architectural moments here. Helmut Jahn's yellow-clad 37-story Veer Towers, set slightly askew, lean toward each other like a pair of drunken tourists careening down a hotel corridor at the end of a very long night. Foster's Harmon Hotel -- which will open next year, delayed by the decision to build it at 28 stories instead of 49 -- is alone among the buildings here in its willingness to look un-pretty. Its blue-and-white facade suggests a cross between a disco ball and a 1970s mirrored-glass office tower by Kevin Roche or John Portman.

Rockwell's interiors for the 500,000-square-foot, Libeskind-designed mall, meanwhile, known as Crystals, feature a treehouse-like wooden structure that crawls across three floors in the center of the retail space, among other inspired touches.

And Libeskind himself? What to say, really, about an architect who has now recycled the same mournful, jagged forms that he deployed in the deeply moving Jewish Museum in Berlin and in his design for the World Trade Center site for use in a high-end shopping mall on the Las Vegas Strip?

His arrival in Las Vegas suggests a precise reversal of the path followed by the architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In their 1972 classic "Learning From Las Vegas," Venturi and Scott Brown (and young collaborator Steven Izenour) encouraged architects to appreciate, and freely borrow, the kitschy, high-energy ornament of the Strip. Eventually those forms and that attitude filtered into the most rarefied precincts of design world officialdom.

Libeskind, as a dedicated intellectual early in his career, argued for applying an architectural version of the approach to literary theory known as deconstruction to buildings, primarily in the form of ruptured façades and vertiginous interiors. Now he has delivered decon's angular angst -- or some faint echo of it -- to the heart of Las Vegas, as a hulking shell for Prada and Gucci boutiques.

That strange cultural boomerang aside, CityCenter is most dramatic, and perhaps best understood, as a terrifically complex piece of privately funded urban infrastructure, a gargantuan city-within-a-city that wraps around an existing Las Vegas street and, for good measure, creates its own grand internal boulevard. The complex stacks its valet drop-offs, taxi stands, a fire station, two parking garages, mechanical systems and pedestrian walkways in a labyrinthine series of concrete decks and curving ramps. It also includes a monorail system, with trains slipping between towers on an elevated track.

The goals MGM Mirage is chasing at CityCenter – walkability, density, verticality and sustainability among them, along with an interest in connecting the development to its neighbors and the rest of the city -- are laudable. But in the end what the company and its architects have created is a kind of bell-jar urbanism, a complex that is closer to an eye-popping, full-scale mock-up of sophisticated city life than the real thing.

CityCenter, ultimately, is as much of an architectural fantasy as any of its neighbors. Its towers manage a remarkable replica, at massive scale, of dense urbanism. But it is still a replica. And given that this may be the last major development Las Vegas sees for a decade, or longer, it is destined to stand as an island surrounded for years by low-rise, car-centered urbanism, foreclosure-filled single-family neighborhoods and general sprawl.

And in any event it is not really in the bottom-line interests of any developer to pursue real, sustained urban connections between and among developments on the Strip. The whole business model -- and architectural typology -- of the hotel-casino, after all, revolves around making it easy for visitors to get in and tough, or at least rather complicated, to get out. If the CityCenter’s edges and sidewalks are far better designed and better integrated with the city than is the case at other big casinos, the complex as a whole works as hard as all the rest to pull you deep into its undertow and keep you there.

-- Christopher Hawthorne

Related:

Interactive graphic of CityCenter

360-degree view

Photo credits: Top, Jacob Kepler, Bloomberg; middle and bottom, Ethan Miller/Getty Images.

Comments

[Ryan D]

Hey look, it's the final nail in the coffin for Vegas.
Good riddance.

[amarciniak]

Hawthorne's architectural comments might be an fair critique, but writing for the LA Times, I do hope he doesn't hold Los Angeles in any higher regard, as I see nothing in this dismal city that can hold a candle to the ambition of this project. One Geary downtown contribution cannot a city save.

[person]

I don't think it is the end because Steel Panther plays there every week. I think Steel Panther is the only thing that will save Vegas from crumbling.

[joe]

Been there it is beautiful! Ryan sounds like your mad about lost money in L.V. maybe you should stop gambling instead of bad mouthing my town.

[allaire]

It's hard to get a good feel from these pictures. I'm sure it's more impressive in person and from a lower angle. I would have liked to see more varitations in the shape of the surrounding buildings and more difference in the materials and colors used for their skins. But I wouldn't count Las Vegas out, or think it's lost in past abundance. The game's not over.

[Dan Eden]

I stayed at my buddy Johnny's last week. He lives in a penthouse right next to CityCenter (spell check doesn't like it yet). I'm from Santa Barbara. It seemed like people were excited for the opening. To me, Vegas was emptier than normal.
I'll tell you one thing- I did a lot of walking- and buzzed is probably why... CityCenter looks like you can do it all in one place - the other places probably hate the opening- oh well- give me a column and I'll tell ya the secrets of any town! :)

[Harry M]

i love reading a christopher hawthorne review.

Downtown Los Angeles, is stuck in a quandary. How does it make itself feel less-car-centric, meaning, how does the public transportation that is to come, (Broadway's trolley and the two subway/connectors), fit in with any if newer downtown projects, the grand avenue design included, towards a more open-pedestrian feel. downtown has hope thru connective arteries and an understanding of symmetric cohesiveness.

[gs_legend]

Visited on Labor Day when this was almost finished. Wouldn't waste my time or money at this piece of crap. They should tear it down it recreate one of the mobster's Stardust or Sands or equivalent casino. This is DISGUSTING. Make any other casino your destination.

[Mee Jin]

Here's the Las Vegas article

[Leonard]

I don't come away with the negatives that you claim Hawthorne expresses in this article. First, he would dare criticize America's most prominent architects (and he makes that clear). I think, in many ways his views are positive. What seems to concern him is not the execution of historical design, but the fact that it represents a complete change of the "traditional" Vegas that Martin had a major part in creating during the second half of the 20th Century. This is a major departure in design that has never been done before in Vegas history. There is no question that Hawthorne recognizes the type of architectural talent he comments on. This is a new era, CityCenter marks the change to the 21st Century which ordinary people will eventually begin to recognize, appreciate and expect. Vegas and sophistication were never used in the same sentence until now!

[Scott]

Some prickly responses here but the fact is that Hawthorne is correct. One cluster of skyscrapers by "starchitects" (a concept now outdated in itself) does not a city make. The urbanity of NY city is incorporated in its very foundation, the way it was built. A current folly is the belief that cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas--cities where sprawl is encoded in their very structure--can reinvent themselves as another NY.

This is basically the Las Vegas equivalent of Century City.

And whether LV will rebound won't have anything to do with this issue. LV will rebound by offering bigger, better, flashier, what they've always done best...

[Wolfy]

the thing looks like a Frank Ghery knockoff.

[Elaine]

I go to Las Vegas quite often and make my donations. I think the above article was very cruel. I've been to Los Angeles many times and their city buildings are nothing to look at by far. The beaches are wonderful, along with the climate but I would not knock Vegas as being down and out. I love that town and can't wait to move there or go there to see the magnificent structures that they just built. Go Vegas Go!

[Las Vegas Insider Vibe]

CityCenter has spent plenty of time hyping the "green" and LEED stuff. But the reality is they went after much of that because of huge tax breaks the State of Nevada instituted a few years ago to encourage green building practices.

CityCenter will do nothing to make the rest of Las Vegas green. And in reality, those who really are concerned about a green lifestyle aren't very likely to visit Las Vegas in the first place. There is nothing green about getting here or visiting here.

The residents as a whole ready don't care about recycling (we have space for landfills that we'll never begin to tap) although many of the big properties do have recycling programs.

Plenty of private and public sector efforts are bringing "big city" type art and culture to town. Will it fly either among locals or tourists? Not the flocks of people you see walking down the Las Vegas Strip with the beer footballs and yard-long drinks.

Having said that, CityCenter is mega-nice. Well worth seeing. Be interesting to see how it does.

Ted Newkirk
Managing Editor
http://www.accessvegas.com

[McMuffin]

I hope that whole state fades away. What a sick state, gassing prisoners to death and letting people die from gangrene while building monuments to consumerism. A sick sick place like this should just go away.

[noguchistein]

I'll do my gambling on Wall Street or Main Street, it's more interesting!

[Ryan G.]

I live in Vegas, and have lived here for nearly 15 years and i am tired of the two themes Vegas has come to know over the past decade or so. Up until CityCenter most of the mega-resorts were themed like a knockoff of another place in the world or time in history (New York New York, The Venetian, Paris, Luxor, Ceasars, Monte Carlo, Excalibur, Mirage, Treasure Island, Etc.)

Vegas has followed the theme of being something it is not, and every new property has added another example of somewhere other than Vegas. Whether it is Roman times, Medieval times, Pirates, Egyptians or a tropical paradise, Vegas has made itself into a location of other places.

CityCenter offers Vegas a chance to have something to call its own. CityCenter is overblown, it is massive, and it does not fit in with the typical Vegas formula that has been so popular over the past decade. But that is a good thing, not a bad thing. It is unique and fits in with the other glass designed buildings in the area such as the Cosmopolitan and the Panorama Towers across the street (in case people forgot about them). By itself it has redefined Vegas, whether you like it or not. Oh, and it brought 9,000 construction jobs in the middle of the recession, and thousands of longterm jobs to the hardest hit city in the country.

Vegas has lost everything in the recession. The housing market collapsed, the worst hit place in the country, unemployment is over 13%, one of the highest in the country, and gambling stats and income has drastically fallen, which was our primary source of state revenue. Schools and city functions have suffered, and because of CityCenter, we may get a small boost to our failing economy. So for all those Vegas haters out there, leave CityCenter alone, it is one of the only things that Las Vegas's have to look forward to in hopes of revitalizing our economy, and our image.

[Vin S.]

Macau has a similar concept to the City Center, called the One Central. Think City Center but in Macau.

[Charles in Charge]

Can't wait to check out CC. The past three times I've been to Vegas, they've been feverishly building these structures.

For those of you who posted negative comments, you're probably just bitter than you threw away your hard earned money! Learn how to manage your money, see a show, visit the outlet stores, have a great meal or two, engage in moderate gambling and you'll most likely have a great time!

[Dana B]

Nuanced discussion - particularly appreciated the short (but insightful) critique regarding how Libeskind has allowed himself to devolve into caricature. Much more can be said about what a complex like this suggests about architectural practice today and where we measure success.